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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Risto Harjula, Jukka Lehto, Esko H. Tusa, Asko Paavola
Nuclear Technology | Volume 107 | Number 3 | September 1994 | Pages 272-278
Technical Paper | Radioactive Waste Management | doi.org/10.13182/NT94-A35007
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
An industrial scale process utilizing hexacyanoferrate-based ion exchangers was developed for the selective separation of radioactive cesium from nuclear waste solutions. This process was put into operation at the Loviisa Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) (pressurized water reactor, VVER-440), Finland, at the end of 1991, and it has shown superiority to any other cesium separation method used at present at nuclear plants. This paper summarizes the work that was carried out in the development of this process. In the first phase of the work, the performance of several cesium-specific precipitants and ion exchangers (eg., zeolites and hexacyanoferrates) was tested by laboratory experiments. Based on these initial tests, two precipitants, sodium hexanitrocobaltate and tungstophosphoric acid, and two hexacyanoferrate exchangers were chosen for pilotscale experiments. These experiments showed that the hexacyanoferrate ion exchangers were the most efficient materials for the removal of 137Cs and 134Cs and were suitable for large-scale column operation. With hexacyanoferrates, decontamination factors (DFs) of several thousands and volume reduction factors (VRFs) in the range of 2000 to 10000, were obtained for 137Cs and 134Cs. By using the cesium-specific precipitants, DFs and VRFs on the order of 100 were feasible in the Loviisa concentrates. After the pilot experiments, an exchanger based on hexacyanoferrate was chosen to be used in the full-scale cesium-separation plant constructed at the Loviisa NPP.
